


burned, about to burn, or still on fire

by Zee (orphan_account)



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-20
Updated: 2012-09-20
Packaged: 2017-11-14 16:18:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,305
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/517226
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/Zee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Derek and Laura, six years, three cities, one car.</p>
            </blockquote>





	burned, about to burn, or still on fire

**Author's Note:**

> Warnings: Graphic descriptions of violence. Graphic descriptions of throwing up. Lots and lots of references to past trauma and an underage relationship.
> 
> The title is from Richard Siken's poem [Straw House, Straw Dog.](http://yupnet.org/siken/2008/03/21/straw-house-straw-dog/) Thanks to Kickthebeat for the beta and the encouragement and in-general-loveliness.

Laura’s 18th birthday comes five months after the fire. Derek is sitting on his temporary foster parents’ front porch, pretending to read _Lord of the Flies_ for his English class when he hears car wheels squeal from several blocks away. Then he smells Laura, and he’s on his feet and standing at the end of the Crossmans’ driveway by the time she pulls up in a black Camaro. The new car smell is almost stifling.

“You’ve got access to the insurance money now?” he asks, although the answer is obvious.

“I signed all the right paperwork this afternoon. I needed a car.” Laura runs her fingers over the steering wheel, like she can’t believe it’s real. “You know I’m a young alpha, and plus I’m female. If I want to keep my head, I’ve got to be powerful, look powerful, any way I can.”

“Plus you’ve wanted one since you were fourteen.”

Laura’s lips quirk up. “There is that.” Laura has always been obsessed with cars, the faster and flashier the better, and when she got her license, it had been her job to drive them both to school in their mother’s minivan every day. Laura had hated it.

Derek doesn’t know what else to say. This is the first time they’ve spoken since he went home with Mr. and Mrs. Crossman. Derek had figured she’d disowned him, figured she was looking for a new pack. 

“Derek.” The command in Laura’s voice makes him stop staring at the black and shiny hood of her car and meet her eyes, which are red now. “We leave tomorrow.”

Derek’s mouth goes dry. He wants to drop to his knees, throw himself at her feet, he wants her to open his throat with one swipe of her claws. “You’re not forgiving me,” he says. “Are you?”

Laura tilts her head, studying him. “You’re my pack.”

It’s not a yes, but it’s not a no. Derek wants to tell her to get the hell away from him, to turn others and make herself strong and leave him here for hunters to find and finish the job. No one deserves to be an omega more than him.

“Stop it,” Laura says, a snarl in her voice, and Derek realizes that the scents of grief and hate must be rolling off of him in waves. He opens his eyes and sees that Laura’s nose is scrunched up and she’s leaning away. He swallows and stands up as tall as he can.

“I’m not going to leave you here.” Her voice isn’t softer at all, and Derek can feel himself reacting to it deep in his spine. Laura hadn’t consulted him when she made the decision to pull the plug on their father three days after the fire, but Derek would have told her that it was right, that it was the only way. He wouldn’t want anyone else to be his alpha. 

“Derek?” Mrs. Crossman stands at the front door, and she crosses the yard to his side when she sees that he’s talking to someone. “Oh, Laura dear, hello,” she says when she sees who it is. She stops a few feet behind Derek, and Derek can see her purse her lips as she takes in the new car. The Crossmans are devoutly religious and don’t have much money; they don’t approve of flashy displays of wealth.

Laura bares her teeth. “Today’s my birthday. You can expect a call from my lawyer about becoming Derek’s legal guardian.”

Mrs. Crossman’s heart rate jumps up a notch. “But you’re still in high school, you’re only two years older than him! I know that you’re family and obviously, we’ve been hoping that you would get more involved with his life—“

“I’m coming to take him with me tomorrow,” Laura says, her voice barely cordial.

Mrs. Crossman sighs. “He has two years until he graduates, and he needs a stable home environment,” she says, her voice gentle as if she’s breaking a hard truth. “Legally you might not be a child anymore, but how are you going to be enough of an authority figure for him?”

Laura doesn’t move or say anything, but the anger swamps him suddenly enough to make Derek’s nostrils sting. He knows she must be struggling to keep the new alpha instincts under control, knows that she’s holding back the urge to tackle Mrs. Crossman to the ground and prove her claim, show her who Derek really belongs to.

Derek realizes that five months of radio silence don’t mean shit. Laura had just needed some time, but she’s not abandoning him. 

And after what he did, if she’s not leaving him now, then she never will.

Laura turns away from Mrs. Crossman to speak to Derek. “Pack your bags,” she says, and starts the car. She drives away faster than Derek could have imagined, and he’s never shared Laura’s fascination with all things motorized, but he has to admit, it’s impressive.

“Derek, sweetheart,” Mrs. Crossman says, touching his elbow. Derek looks at her, then walks back inside and to his room, shutting the door and not bothering to retrieve _Lord of the Flies_ from where he left it on the porch.

Mrs. Crossman always makes his lunch, and Mr. Crossman, who’s an engineer the next town over, always offers to help him with his math homework. They encourage him to stay on the lacrosse team, and after the first few weeks, they stop trying to force him to attend church. 

He’s waiting with two duffel bags when Laura picks him up the next day, but she only allows him to take one. There’s hardly any room in her new car for luggage; it only fits the two of them.

 

*

 

They drive for five days and settle in Philadelphia, because Laura wants to be across the country from Beacon Hills, wants to be in a big city for anonymity’s sake, and Philly’s one of the only cities on the Eastern Seaboard that doesn’t have any Argents in it. (At least, according to the friends of the family that Laura still speaks to, so that could easily be false; it’s not like they stop looking over their shoulders.) Laura gets her GED, and Derek gets his driver’s license. Laura enrolls him at the local “alternative” high school—being a sophomore, he unfortunately can’t skip ahead to getting his GED yet, but he can complete classes through filling out packets and taking tests online. 

For a while, the dreams stop coming (not the dreams about his parents, or about fire—as if those could ever leave him). Maybe it’s the presence of his sister that keeps them at bay, Derek’s not sure, but it doesn’t last. He falls asleep and finds himself at Kate’s apartment, and she’s crying and telling him how much she can’t live without him and begging him to take her back.

In his dream, he yells at her, but doesn’t even hear what words he might be saying—is it about his parents? The fire? Betrayal in general? He feels drunk with vindication when she falls to her knees and says that she was wrong about everything. She grasps at his legs, her fingers clenching in the denim on his thighs.

“I’ll never take you back,” he hears himself say. But his heart soars when she looks up at him. 

“I’ve never loved anyone the way I love you,” Kate whispers, and Derek drops to his knees beside her. She moans and goes limp when he kisses her, her arms wrapping around his neck. “I’m not a hunter anymore, I’ve left it all behind, all I want is you, I swear you can trust me,” she tells him between kisses. Her breasts are soft when she presses up against him and her hands are on the bare skin of his chest, tracing his ribcage. It’s the best, most satisfying thing he’s felt in six months.

He wakes up sweaty and erect. Laura's sitting on the edge of his bed (her voice calling his name is what woke him, he realizes), her eyes wide enough that he can see the whites of her eyes surrounding her pupils. The satisfaction and happiness from his dream evaporate, replaced by shame and bile at the back of his throat.

Derek shoves away his bedcovers and stumbles to the toilet. He kneels there for too long, clammy hands gripping the toilet seat, staring at the grime that's collected where the seat meets the lid. He tries to retch, but he can’t; his gag reflex just won’t kick in. Isn’t he horrified enough to puke up everything?

“You were dreaming about her?”

He doesn’t bother to admit it. He smells like arousal, shame, anger and fear, and they both know that only one person could be responsible.

“It was a nightmare,” Derek says through gritted teeth. He knows his heart rate gives him away, but he at least has to try, because he doesn’t think he could survive Laura knowing—

“You’re still in love with her.” 

“No!” Derek’s claws come out, scraping against the porcelain. “I fucking hate her—“ His teeth come out so fast that his words become unintelligible, lost in the midst of his growl as he starts to twist around. 

But before he can lash out, he feels Laura’s paw on the back of his neck, gripping him hard. Five claws dig into the skin at the base of his skull, five sharp points of pain that bring him back to himself. He whimpers as his teeth and claws both retract, and Laura lets go of his neck to grasp his shoulders with human hands.

“Breathe,” she tells him. “It was just a dream.”

Derek closes his eyes. “I have dreams about ripping her throat out, too.”

Laura sucks in a breath and runs her thumb over one of the punctures she made in his neck, already healing. “I know.”

“I don’t love her.”

Laura scoots around until she’s sitting at his side, and he turns to face her. Laura’s cheek is red from where she’d been sleeping against her pillow, and her eyelids are puffy. “I can’t blame you for not being able to just—“ she snaps her fingers. “Switch off your feelings like that.”

He hasn’t let himself think about Kate while masturbating. Small victories. 

“It’s been six months,” Derek says, too ashamed and embarrassed to do more than mumble. “I should be over her by now.”

Laura snorts, like she’s not sure that ‘over her’ has any kind of meaning when talking about someone who seduced you and then murdered your family. “Doesn’t matter.” 

“It _matters_ \--“

“Look, no matter how often you dream about her or what happens in those dreams, it doesn’t change the fact—Derek, listen to me, that fire wasn’t your fault.”

It’s not the first time she’s said it to him, but it’s the first time she’s said it with a steady pulse. Tears slide down his cheeks, and Laura pulls him into a hug and lets him muffle his sobs against her shoulder. He feels it against his chest when she growls, low and almost inaudible, but instead of making him cower, he recognizes it as protection.

 

*

 

On his seventeenth birthday, he comes home from the gym to find a german chocolate cake on the kitchen table in their apartment. There’s one candle in the center, and Laura’s standing in front of the dishwasher, grinning at him. “It’s your favorite, right?”

It is, and Derek’s face breaks into a grin before the rest of him can fully catch up. Because that scent—

He’s back at his fifteenth birthday, his mother presenting him with his favorite cake, fifteen candles crowded onto it. She grins at him and puts a hand on the top of his head, petting his hair, and his dad makes a comment about how this has got to be the year that Derek finally bulks up a bit, but he’s smiling, too. Laura’s there, along with his three favorite cousins, Caitlin, Amanda and Dave, and everyone sings happy birthday, and when Derek blows out the candles, six wolves howl in unison. 

Derek spent his sixteenth birthday with Kate, losing his virginity on top of silk sheets.

Laura comes immediately to his side, steadying him with a hand on his arm. “Oh god, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize—“ she says, and he can tell that she’s just now remembering his fifteenth, too. 

“It’s okay,” he says, even though he can feel his heart in his throat, swelling to block the passage of air and keeping him from swallowing.

“No, it’s not. I didn’t get it to remind you of Mom and Dad, I just thought... I was just thinking that it was your favorite.” 

Laura sounds miserable. Derek takes some deep breaths and gives her as much of a smile as he can. “It is my favorite. Thank you. Here, come on, let’s eat. Did you get any ice cream?”

He sits down at the table, and he can feel Laura’s hesitation, but then she goes to the freezer to retrieve the vanilla that he knows is there. She’s already sliced the cake, and he serves himself, then waits for Laura to dig a scoop out of the hardened ice cream. He can be cheerful, he can appreciate this.

But he takes one bite and it’s almost like his mother is beside him again, the sense memory is so strong. The chocolate and coconut taste like bitter ash on his tongue, and he has to force himself to swallow. Laura sits across from him at the table, staring at the single candle on the cake and biting her lip.

He tries to take a second bite, but he can’t even choke it down. He sets the fork down on his plate. “I’m sorry.”

“No, god, _I’m_ sorry,” Laura says. “I should have realized. I just wanted to surprise you with something good, I didn’t want—you shouldn’t have to think about death on your birthday.”

“No different from any other day,” he says with a shrug. Laura frowns, but he knows it’s the same with her. 

 

*

 

Derek finishes enough coursework to graduate in December, months before he would have had he stayed at Beacon Hills High. There’s no ceremony.

He doesn’t want to go to community college, enough that he fights Laura on it. They destroy the couch and the coffee table and then she throws him through the door to the bathroom, and he hits his head hard on the edge of the bathtub. Laura pins him while his vision is still black, her knee on his lower back and her fingers in his hair, pushing his cheek down against the ceramic tiles of the floor.

“God dammit Derek,” she says as her tongue, lips and jaw morph back to human. “It’s for your own good! We can’t just—“ The rest of her shifts back, and the weight on his back eases. “We can’t just cut ourselves off from the rest of the world!”

“Why not?” Derek’s pretty sure that she broke more than one of his ribs, and the bone knitting back together hurts worse than the breakage in the first place. He doesn’t see what the hell the rest of the world could ever offer him.

He hears Laura sigh, and she moves off of him completely. “Because it’s not what they would have wanted for us. And it’s not what I want for you.”

“I still don’t—“

She kicks him in the ribs and he whimpers. “This isn’t a discussion. Their spring quarter starts in March.”

“Fine!” Derek curls around his injured side and doesn’t look at Laura, glares at the floor instead. She just gives a loud sigh and stands, walking through the hole where the bathroom door used to be.

“You lost us our security deposit,” Derek calls out after her, and she growls in response.

 

*

 

“They forced me to do it,” Kate whispers, tears streaming down her face. “I tried to stop the fire, but it was too late.”

Derek turns away and runs, but Kate just ends up in front of him. She reaches out to cup his cheek. “Do you really think I could hurt you on purpose? Never, never, I need you.”

The hand tightens and turns cold as ice against his skin. “I need you. Please give me another chance. I love you. I love you.”

Derek wakes up slow. How many heartbeats does it take before reality gets real again? He counts them and stares up at the ceiling. 

 

*

 

He’s nineteen when Laura begins to take notice. At first she tries to be subtle about it, asking him if there are any cute girls in his classes, and pointing it out when Derek gets hit on by cashiers, bank tellers, co-commuters on the bus. One time, he and Laura are out at the pizza place down the block from their apartment, and their waitress leaves her phone number on their credit card receipt, sliding it across the table to him with a shy smile that Derek doesn’t return.

“Are you gonna call her? Oh, you should definitely at least call her, she seemed sweet,” Laura says excitedly, following Derek as he walks out of the restaurant much faster than necessary.

“No.” Derek grabs the receipt out of Laura’s hand, crumpling it and tossing it in the gutter.

“Hey, that’s just mean.” Laura bumps his elbow with her own, and Derek looks down at the ground and walks even faster.

“Jesus, you don’t have to run away, I’ll drop it.” Laura catches up to him, and doesn’t say another word about the phone number, doesn’t push it. 

It happens again a few days later at a different diner, and this time Laura doesn’t look surprised when Derek just leaves the receipt on the table. She doesn’t say anything until they get in the car, one of her hands on the steering wheel, the other reaching out to touch the back of Derek’s neck, feeling his pulse, steadying him.

“Why does it bother you so much?”

He just shrugs. Laura shrugs back at him.

“Look, I don’t care if you don’t want to go out with strangers who shove their numbers at you in public, but—you’re a teenage boy, don’t you want to, you know... kiss girls and stuff?”

Laura sounds horrifically out of her depth, and Derek knows that he should be understanding about it but it just makes him angry. He shoves her hand away. “Don’t try to be my mother.”

Laura growls softly. “I’m your alpha.”

His instincts are to be cowed, but he makes himself meet her eyes and glare. “I don’t care. It’s none of your business.”

She bares her teeth at him, and they stay like that until Derek feels beads of sweat break out on his forehead. Then Laura looks away, rolling her eyes and starting the car. “Fine, be lonely and horny, see if I care.”

Derek wants to point out that it’s not like Laura ever gets to second dates with anyone, that she never spends the night with anyone else even though Derek’s told her that he’d be fine if she wanted to, and is that really so different from refusing to try in the first place? Except that he knows Laura would respond by telling him that at least she’s getting laid now and then. And oh god, Laura might even try to give him a version of the terrible talk he got from his mother at age thirteen, about how sex can be a good and necessary part of a werewolf’s life because it helps let off steam and increases one’s control over their instincts. 

The last thing Derek wants to talk about is sex. He holds his breath, but Laura turns on the radio and doesn’t bring the subject up again. 

*

 

He’s taken first level courses in history, chemistry, math, philosophy and political science, but economics is the only subject that he’s found both interesting and easy enough to want to continue. He signs up for Economics 102, figuring that the sustained interest in one topic will please Laura enough that he doesn’t need to bother taking more than one class, and he’s right. When he mentions it to her, she looks like she’s holding herself back from asking him if he wants to be an econ major and discussing actual plans for his degree. 

He knows that Laura wants to believe that Derek can be someone who cares about college, who plans for the future, who pictures a normal and full life for himself someday. He’s pretty sure that she wants that for him more than she wants anything for herself, and he hates to disappoint her, but he knows what is and isn’t possible. 

Sometimes when he looks at Laura, the way she’s healing is so clear and strong that he can almost smell it. He doesn’t know if it’s because she’s the alpha, or because she never knew Kate, or because maybe at her core she’s just more resilient than Derek could ever be. He knows that she still dreams about fire all the time and that she still carries eleven ghosts on her shoulders every day, but somehow she enjoys her job and points it out when the weather’s nice and smiles back when someone smiles at her. And she takes care of Derek and is invested in his life, she worries that he’s spending too much time at the gym and not enough time trying to make friends, she wants him to find another anchor. 

Derek wishes for her sake that he could at least try to, or that at least he had the words to explain why he can’t.

On the first day of class, Derek is late, and when he steps hurriedly into the classroom, he can feel plenty of eyes on him, and someone even gasps. It's embarrassing, but he's almost used to it by now--what's unusual is that when he glances up, meeting the eyes of one of the people staring at him, he feels a pull of attraction so intense that he almost stumbles.

And because his luck is awful, the only open seat in the whole room is next to the boy. Derek hurries to sit and slumps down as far as he can, struggling not to inhale his scent or glance at him out of the corner of his eye. He’s got reddish-brown hair, a septum piercing and gauged ears, and Derek can see colorful tattoos snaking up his right forearm to disappear under the sleeve of his black t-shirt. 

He’s being completely obvious about continuing to check Derek out, a fact which Derek is failing to handle with grace. He focuses on getting his notebook and pen out of his backpack, but the professor is just reading the syllabus aloud, nothing that he can pretend to be interested in or take notes on. 

The boy leans over, giving Derek a charming smile. “Hey, how’s it going? I’m Gavin.”

Against his will, Derek’s mouth makes an embarrassing shape that could be a smile, if you’d never seen one before. He thinks his ears might be turning red. “Uh, Derek. Hi.”

Of course he’s found himself attracted to other people since the fire; it’s not like his hormones went anywhere. But it’s not usually accompanied by a swooping his stomach like this. The fact that he can tell the interest is mutual makes it so much worse, and he can feel dread infusing each of his muscles as Gavin continues to talk, murmuring jokes while they both ignore the professor.

Derek tries to leave quickly as soon as the class ends, but Gavin catches up to him as they both exit the building. “Hey, you busy right now? Wanna grab a coffee or something?”

It’s far more sudden than Derek was prepared for. “No, um—I’ve got to work, sorry,” he says, and stares first at Gavin’s mouth, and then the ground.

“Another time, then. What’s your number, I’ll text you,” Gavin says, his phone already in hand, his lips toying with a quirky smile. He has dimples, Derek notices helplessly.

Gavin is smooth enough that Derek doesn’t even realize what he’s doing until after he’s said the seventh digit. Gavin’s smile turns into a grin, and Derek feels his pocket buzz.

“And now you’ve got mine! Cool. I’ll see you on Thursday, or maybe sooner?” 

“Maybe,” Derek mumbles, and gets the hell out of there.

Thankfully the bus he takes home is filled with enough smells that it drives Gavin mostly out of his nose. And he doesn’t take his phone out to look at the text Gavin sent him, doesn’t save his number, but he’s never been more aware of the plastic weight in his pocket.

When he gets home, Laura’s head is under the kitchen sink—Derek assumes she’s trying to fix the leaky plumbing. She pulls her head out and stands up when she sees him. “Can you go to the store and pick up more dish soap oh my God, you’ve got a crush!”

Her nostrils are flared and she’s grinning at him, and Derek winces. So much for his hope that Laura wouldn’t smell it on him. “Not true,” he tries, but Laura just laughs and follows him when he tries to flee to their room. 

“Oh man, is she in your class? What’s her name? Have you asked her out yet? Of course you haven’t, but you should, I’ll even let you use the car to pick her up, she will _love_ that.”

“It’s a guy, not a girl,” Derek says, and Laura’s mouth makes an ‘O’ shape for a second, but she quickly recovers.

“Then he’ll probably be even more into the car! Not that you need the help, Mr. Biceps, but—“

“Please stop,” Derek snaps. “I’m not going to do anything about it, okay? Just—stop.”

Laura’s hands clench into fists, then relax. “You know I worry about you dying alone,” she says, then leaves Derek in his room, going back to the kitchen sink. Derek grabs his running shoes and tries to ignore the worry and sadness her scent leaves behind.

Derek spends the next two days tense as hell, and when he realizes on Thursday morning that it’s because he’s both anticipating and dreading a phone call or text message, he throws his phone out the window. Laura finds him sitting on the couch twenty minutes before his class is scheduled to start; he’s missed the bus that would take him across town to campus.

Derek waits for her to start berating him, but Laura just rests on her arm on the couch behind him. “You know, you don’t have to do a damn thing you don’t want to,” she says, and her voice uncharacteristically soft, the touch of her fingers on his shoulder uncharacteristically lacks command. “But just—do you really want to let it fuck up your life? What if, what if you’re in a situation someday where you have to function normally around someone you’re attracted to?”

Derek growls, and Laura rolls her eyes.

“No, you’re not ‘functioning,’ you’re panicking and running away. Give me a break.”

“I missed the bus. I don’t want to be late twice in a row.”

“So you’d rather be late the first day and absent the second? Jesus Christ, just take the car, idiot.” Laura slaps him on the shoulder and tosses him the keys, which Derek catches without looking. He stares at the wall in front of him and leans into her touch for a few seconds more before he stands and leaves.

He finds a seat across the room from where he sat Tuesday, but Gavin saunters into the classroom after him, and of course he finds the empty seat behind Derek. Thank god there’s an actual lecture today that Derek can focus on.

When class ends this time, he doesn’t bother to try running away, instead letting Gavin fall into step beside him as they walk out of the room. 

“So,” Gavin says, drawing out the vowels, giving the word multiple syllables. “Do you work after class today, too?”

There go his ears, turning red again. He could say yes so easily, but some childish part of him wakes up and nudges him the other way. “No.”

Gavin grins at him. “Then can I buy you some coffee?”

When Gavin sees the Camaro, it’s clear that it’s not the kind of car that he expected. He takes it casually, offering up an appreciative “Nice ride” and then not saying anything else, but Derek smells excitement on him as he gets in the passenger side, and it grows when Derek guns the accelerator.

Derek’s never been on a date before (a tiny blessing: it means that sitting across the table from a stranger and sipping a latte doesn’t remind him of Kate, but the realization that he’s not thinking about her makes him think of her). He doesn’t think he likes them. He likes the sound of Gavin’s voice, and the way Gavin’s scent mixes with the scent of espresso and the hazelnut syrup in Gavin’s drink. He likes listening to Gavin ramble on about couch surfing and socialism, but any time either of them finishes a sentence and it’s time for a new question to be asked, Derek wants to cover his face in his hands and shut out the world until this ends.

He doesn’t do well on his side of the getting-to-know-you game. He finds himself lying even about inconsequential things that he _could_ be honest about (he lives with a roommate, not a sister; he’s lived in Philly since he was twelve). There’s no point to this, and Derek is ready to give up and throw in the towel fifteen minutes in. Somehow they make it a whole forty minutes, before Gavin gives up after several seconds of staring at Derek, presumably waiting for Derek to find another thread of conversation to follow, and sighs and says, “Well, I should probably get going.”

“Me too,” Derek says, relieved. They both stand and drop their ceramic mugs in the black plastic bucket on the counter, then leave. “Can I, uh, drop you off somewhere?”

Gavin looks at him and smiles slowly, like he hasn’t just wasted forty minutes getting bored to tears by someone who’s handsome enough but can’t open up or at least think up some interesting lies. “Nah, my bus stop’s right here. But I’ll walk you to your car.”

The car is parked all of twenty yards away, and Derek doesn’t get what Gavin wants. He knows he should break the awkward silence while they walk, but instead his hands are shoved in the pockets of his jacket and he’s staring at his feet as they move.

“Well, thanks,” he says when they reach the Camaro. “That was nice.” 

Gavin shakes his head, staring at Derek’s mouth. “You really need to loosen up, man.” 

Then he leans in and kisses Derek. One of Gavin’s hands slides into Derek’s hair and cups the back of his head, while his other hand settles on Derek’s side, over his jacket. Derek freezes. He can’t open his mouth and he can’t pull away. After a while, Gavin’s mouth moves off of his, only a few centimeters away, and then Gavin tilts his head and moves back in again, more purposefully, his lips nudging Derek’s lips apart until Derek can feel Gavin’s tongue flicking his teeth. 

Derek can’t breathe. He can feel himself moving forward, responding, but everything seems frozen.

Eventually, Gavin breaks the kiss, lets go of Derek and steps away. “Call me over the weekend. I’m serious.”

Derek doesn’t have a phone and no longer has Gavin’s number. “Sure.”

He gets into the car and watches Gavin walk towards the bus stop until he’s out of sight, then gets out and runs to the back of the café and braces himself against the dirty brick wall and throws up behind the dumpster. 

It wasn’t the best choice, he should have gone for the gutter instead, because the stink of the garbage combined with the smell of his puke are almost enough to make him pass out. He clamps his hand over his nose (which means that the bile running out of his nostrils gets on his palm, wonderful) and stumbles back, landing on his ass. He can’t stay on his back, has to roll over onto his hands and knees because he’s not done, he can feel his gag reflex going again. He wretches again onto the gravel until there’s nothing left in his stomach. He doubts that he’ll ever be able to drink espresso or steamed milk again. 

The puking leaves him shaky and weak, and even with his body already healing, it’s a long few seconds before he’s able to stand. He wipes his mouth and his nose with his shirt, and thinks about going back into the café to ask for some water, but instead he gets back in the car and goes home. 

Laura looks up, her brow wrinkling in confusion when he comes through the door. “Don’t,” Derek says when she opens her mouth. 

Laura ignores him, standing up and coming over. “Jesus, are you okay? What happened?” 

She reaches out to touch him, and Derek snarls and smacks her hand away with his claws. Laura’s eyes widen and go red, and Derek shoulders past her and into their room, slamming the door and sinking to the ground, his back against it. Laura pounds on it and tries to open it, but he presses his whole body back. She could force it open in alpha form, of course, and he holds his breath, waiting for her to do just that, but instead she curses and stomps away, and he hears her grab her keys and leave the apartment.

Derek hits the back of his head against the door until he hears the wood start to splinter. He wishes, not for the first time, that they had separate rooms: the two twin beds in here made sense at first, when one or both of them always woke from nightmares in the middle of every night needing to be comforted, and plus they both just felt safer falling asleep if the other one was close. But now Derek thinks he might trade the security for privacy.

He gets up eventually because he still needs to rinse his mouth out. The memory of Kate’s tongue in his mouth isn’t vivid, not after three years, but it’s still there. He’s not sure if it’s that, specifically, that made him throw up. It could have been—could have been a lot of things.

He drops the class, and doesn’t bother to sign up for anything else that semester. Laura waspishly asks him what the hell he’s going to do to fill his time, and he doesn’t answer her, just spends as much time as he possibly can out of the apartment, running or walking or driving through the city.

 

*

 

The hunter finds him in an empty street between the bus stop and the apartment. He’s lounging against a streetlight, and as Derek passes he gets a sudden whiff of—something, enough to make him tense and turn, but the man already has a crossbow pointed at Derek’s midsection.

“Don’t make a move, son.” The hunter has graying hair but he looks strong and experienced, and Derek lets himself be herded into the alleyway behind them.

“I haven’t hurt anyone,” Derek says.

“And I don’t intend to hurt you,” says the hunter, although he doesn’t lower his weapon. “You and your sister’ve been lucky enough to have a city mostly free of hunters all to yourself, and I thought a courtesy call to let you know we’ve arrived was the polite thing to do.”

“We’re living here peacefully, we have no quarrel with you.” Emergency words and defensive phrases that his mother drilled into his head when he was eight, truths that Derek has long since stopped believing would protect him.

The hunter shrugs. He’s got an ugly scar running from his temple up over his left eyebrow, and the way he’s looking at Derek clearly communicates a loathing for Derek’s entire species. “Yeah, maybe you’re peaceful. Or maybe you’re just real good at covering your tracks.”

Derek wants to get in this man’s face and demand to know how he lives with himself, he wants to tell the guy to stop pretending to go by any kind of bullshit code, he wants to rip his throat out. He says nothing, because the hunter won’t change his mind if he’s decided to kill Derek. There’s nothing he can do to prove his innocence, not with this man staring at him like he’s vermin. 

The hunter studies him for a moment, and then snorts. “I’d bet that you’ve shed blood. You’re young, there’s no way you’ve got the control to rein yourself in every full moon. No, you’re a killer, I can smell it.”

Derek lets his claws come out, and the hunter sights down the length of his crossbow. Then Laura steps in from the street, grabbing the man’s wrist and twisting it until he yells and drops the bow. She throws him to the ground, and comes over to stand protectively in front of Derek as the hunter rolls and gets to his feet.

“You were threatening my brother. That was stupid. You must know he’s not an omega.” Her fangs are fully extended, changing the shape of her mouth enough to make her words slightly hard to understand.

“I was testing, not threatening.” The hunter’s scent changes with Laura’s arrival—fearful, no longer predatory. “The two of you have had free rein in this city for almost three years now, with no hunters around to keep an eye on you.”

Laura’s growl turns into more of a roar, and the hunter’s heart rate gets louder and faster, but he stands his ground. “You’re being watched,” he says. “We just thought you might like to know.”

“Get out of here. Now.” Laura’s voice is barely recognizable as human. Her shoulders are rippling, the muscles shifting into their bigger, stronger form. Derek can tell that she’s fighting it and losing. The hunter turns and runs, which was exactly the wrong thing to do, as the wolf’s urge to give chase is so strong that it drowns the rest of her humanity. She springs forward, and Derek yells her name and grabs her arm, his claws sinking deep into her flesh.

The pain distracts her, and she turns on Derek instead. Her paw catches him in the chest and sends him flying across the alley to smash into the opposite wall. The skin on his temple and cheek gets rips to shreds as his face hits the brick, and he can feel several ribs fracture and break. It’s the most intense physical pain he’s experienced in quite some time.

Laura crouches at his side, human again. “Sorry,” she says, gruffly and without guilt. Which is fine: his scrapes are the only possible outcome of clawing a pissed-off alpha, and they’re far from the most pressing problem right now. “What did you tell him?”

“The truth. That we’re peaceful, that we haven’t hurt anyone. I don’t think he believed me.” He sits up and leans against the wall, listening to his heart beat gradually slow.

Laura snarls softly at the hunter’s abandoned crossbow. “Fuck him. Fuck _all_ of them. If they come near you again, I’ll—“

“No. We can’t wait for them to decide we’ve put a toe out of line. We need to leave, now.”

Laura cuffs the side of his head, making his ears ring. “We have a life here, and we’re not leaving just because some hunters are trying to bully us!”

“He saw you change in broad daylight and almost attack him! He’s going to tell the others that you’re out of control—“

Laura’s hand is at the back of his neck, shoving him face down on the ground. Derek snaps at her wrist and struggles, and she lets her claws extend, gouging into his skin and pushing his bloody cheek into the gravel. “We’re not running,” Laura says, her lips against his ear. “If we start now, we’ll never stop.’

Derek goes limp, and Laura lets him go. He sits up again, and neither of them say anything for a while. There’s blood on her shirt from where his claws got her, but those wounds will have already healed, whereas the cuts she gave his neck won’t be gone till the morning.

Packs of two are not ideal. A pack is better balanced with at least two betas: it gives the alpha more solid power base, and the alpha’s instincts (the protectiveness, the aggression) don’t get entirely focused on just one wolf. 

Derek knows that he’ll never be in a pack larger than two again, and he wouldn’t trade it. But sometimes it’s exhausting. Sometimes he wishes she could just be his sister. 

Laura is the first one to stand. “Let’s get home. We can clean and bandage your neck.” She holds out a hand to help him up, and he takes it.

 

*

 

It ends up being an accident, not that that matters. For Laura’s 21st birthday, 2 of her co-workers take her out for drinks, and she drags Derek with them despite his protests that he doesn’t have a fake ID. (“Just look for the female bartenders and smile when you order—actually, that’ll probably work for the guys, too.”) A crowded bar and a new-to-them breed of wolfsbane, the scent disguised because it’s mixed with the Jagerbomb that Laura knocks back with her friends. They never find out which of the bartenders spiked it—a stranger in the crowd is the one who follows Laura into the single-stall bathroom, slipping her foot in the door as it closes and then darting inside, locking the door as Laura (her reflexes slowing) turns to say it’s occupied.

It’s not long before Derek puts together what his senses are telling him and realizes that Laura’s not alone in there—thirty seconds, maybe. The crowd seems thicker than ever as he tries to shove his way through it, trying not to panic and push anyone too hard, trying not to attract attention even though his heart’s in his throat. Through some small miracle, there’s no line for the bathroom, no one to loiter around and notice when Derek breaks the handle and forces his way inside.

Laura is slumped on the floor next to the toilet, conscious but still human (later, they’ll do the research and find out that this particular type of wolfsbane leaves the werewolf coherent and alert but unable to transform). The hunter crouches over Laura, and when she whirls around at the sound of Derek behind her, Derek can see that it’s a girl—Laura’s age, or maybe even younger. 

He’s moving before anything resembling a logical thought has crossed his mind. He grabs the girl and drags her away from Laura, slamming her against the wall. He expects that the blow to knock the wind out of her for at least a few seconds, which is why her fist slamming into his windpipe takes him by surprise. Derek chokes and lets go, stumbling back even as the girl kicks him in the shin, slightly painful but completely secondary because he can’t fucking breathe.

His throat heals quickly, but in that time the girl has put several feet between them and has removed a sword (a short sword, but _still_ ) from the scabbard strapped to her back. Laura is calling his name, struggling to stand, and the hunter girl looks terrified but she’s holding the sword like she’s been trained how to use it, and she’s positioned her body between Derek and his sister.

“I’m just going to take her in for questioning,” the girl says. “She won’t be hurt.”

Derek doesn’t bother to answer. Swords are the favorite weapon of many hunters for a reason—it gives them a longer reach in hand-to-hand combat and is a much better compensation for their lack of strength and speed than a gun. Plenty of werewolves won’t even slow down if your bullet catches them anywhere but the heart or the head, but stabbing or slicing (even if they miss) has more of an effect.

He feints right and then slides in low towards her, kicking out. His foot connects with the side of her shin—he’s probably fracturing something, but he thinks he at least managed to avoid shattering her kneecap—

She cries out, and as she falls her sword swings down in a clumsy, wild arc and slices across Derek’s midsection, cutting deep into his internal organs. There’s a spray of blood and Derek curls his body around the massive wound, thinking that it just might be enough to kill him. 

The hunter grabs the edge of a sink and uses it to pull herself to her feet, with her one uninjured leg taking all her weight. Her mouth is set in a determined line, and Derek can see from the tamped-down panic in her eyes that this wasn’t supposed to go this way, but she’s (possibly mortally) injured a beta now, and she’ll have to kill them both or be killed herself. 

Laura makes a guttural sound, caught halfway between a human cry and a howl—Derek can smell from the change in the air that she’s trying to turn. It must be taking every ounce of her willpower. She pushes herself off the wall and strikes out at the hunter, and even though Laura’s still sluggish and can’t shift fully into her alpha form, there’s enough strength in the blow to send the girl flying. Her body spins and her head hits one of the sinks with a loud crack like a gunshot. Her sword is under her when she falls, but not at the right angle to completely impale her, but it doesn’t matter, as the blow to her skull has already killed her. 

Laura sways and puts a hand on the wall. “Oh, fuck.”

Derek can’t muster an answer. He’s too busy clutching his wound and doing his best to keep his guts from spilling out. Even with the healing, his body won’t be able to just create new intestines. 

Laura only wastes a second or two staring at the girl she killed before bending down and gathering Derek in her arms, setting him on his feet and propping him against the wall. “Try to stay conscious,” she says, and Derek manages to nod a little. His fingers are slippery with his own blood, and they’re starting to not work very well, his reflexes stumbling, his body going into shock.

The bathroom door still lacks a handle, let alone a lock, so Laura rips a toilet out of the wall and sets it against the door, blocking it for now. There’s a tiny window right at the ceiling, and Laura has to jump up on one of the sinks in order to break the glass and haul herself out onto the grass. For a few moments she’s out of sight, and Derek stares up at the space where she was; then she comes back into view, her head and shoulders leaning into the bathroom, her arms reaching down to haul him up and out.

There’s a trio of smokers standing a few feet away from the bathroom window, staring at them as Laura drags him out of the building. She turns her head and roars, and they bolt. 

“I can walk,” Derek manages to say, because Laura is still cradling his body to her chest like a child.

“Can you run?” 

Derek doesn’t bother to state the obvious. He just lets her tighten her grip as she takes off, sprinting down the block to where their car is parked at the end of the street.

When they’re wolfed out, their hands leave no fingerprints, and Derek’s blood won’t register as human, so they probably don’t have to worry about the police. But they count as fair game for the hunters, now. Which means they’re out of time.

Laura gets them out of there as fast as she can, being far rougher with the Camaro than she’s usually willing to be. As soon as they can no longer see the bar in the rearview window, Laura puts her fingers on the back of his neck. 

He tries to shove her hand away. “No, you have to drive—“

“Shut up,” Laura says, showing her fangs. Her fingers tighten into a vice grip on his neck, and he wants to object more, to point out that she still has _wolfsbane_ in her system for fuck’s sake, but he can already feel the energy flowing from Laura’s fingers. 

It’s like walking into air-conditioning on a hot day, or huddling in front of a fire during a snow storm. The pain gets drowned out and deafened by the hazy softness now dominating his senses, and he can feel his entrails knitting themselves back together faster. He starts to feel less like his body is falling to pieces.

Laura’s head lolls, her eyelids fluttering, and the car swerves. Derek is jolted out of the healing transfer and grabs the wheel, straightening them out. 

“You have to stop, I’m fine, I’m _fine._ ” He can see where the veins are bulging black in her forearms, her already-stressed body doing its best to accommodate his pain. 

“Shut up,” she tells him again, but she releases his neck and puts both hands back on the steering wheel. She still looks almost ready to faint, but the car doesn’t swerve again. 

“That was a setup, wasn’t it,” Derek says. “That girl back there. She was all by herself, no reinforcements, they wanted us to lose control and kill her.”

Laura grinds her teeth together and stares straight ahead. “Probably.”

Among hunters, the emphasis placed upon self-sacrifice varies from family—as does willingness to strictly follow the code, of course. Derek doesn’t know how common it is for frame jobs like this to happen, but it doesn’t really matter. Any hunter that wants to can come after them now with no repercussions. 

He remembers one of the first times his mother ever sat him down to have a conversation about being hunted. He’d been nine. 

“One of the things you have to understand about hunters is that they would prefer it if we were all killers,” she’d told him, her fingers petting his head, her other hand squeezing his shoulder. “Plenty of them lie to themselves about it, about why they do what they do, but it doesn’t change anything. They still want us to be monsters.”

“But then more people would die,” Derek had objected. 

His mother shrugged. “Yes, but they’d also be able to kill more werewolves. And that desire is at the very root of who they are.”

Once they get onto the highway, Laura speeds up to 80 mph. Some of the color has come back to her cheeks, but she’s still gripping the steering wheel tight with both hands. When Derek rips the cotton of his ruined t-shirt away from his wound, he can see that it’s healing quickly, but the skin on either side of the gash still flap open if he stops holding himself together.

“It wasn’t your fault,” he says. Laura sighs.

“I don't care. It doesn't matter."

It's not her fault because if it weren't Derek they'd never be here in the first place. Laura would probably be graduating from college. No one would be trying to turn her into a rabid killer.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and Laura reaches over, runs her fingers through his hair, her thumb brushing his temple. 

“I’m sorry, too.”

 

*

 

Historically, werewolves have avoided settling in or near high populations of humans; the smaller the town, the better. Hunters have followed the werewolves, and so most of the biggest urban centers in the country have far fewer hunters than you might expect. Which means that, no matter how much safer Derek would feel if they kept moving and stuck to backwater towns and old roads that didn’t seem to get any traffic, they’re paradoxically better off hiding in the open. New York City is the closest and most logical choice. 

They get an apartment in the Bronx, and keep it for almost six months before someone leaks wolfsbane gas into their heating vents before setting the building on fire. They escape, but hunters disguised as firefighters find them as they stumble out of the wreckage. Laura makes Derek run and draw their fire while she slips away to get the car; thankfully, a lone hunter finds her in the parking garage, and she has the sense to grab his gun when she takes him out—otherwise, Derek would have died from the three wolfsbane bullets in his chest when she grabs him. Laura teaches him how to apply the wolfsbane ash to the small, circular holes in his flesh and holds his hand as the magic works through his veins. He screams and squeezes hard enough to break several bones in her palm. It’s hard to say that it hurts worse than a sword in his belly, because they’re two very different kinds of pain, but it comes close.

 

*

 

Derek and Laura both loathe Las Vegas. Unfortunately, the city has a reputation for also being loathed by hunters, and there’s the added bonus of Vegas being several thousands of miles away from the specific hunters who want to kill them. 

Laura gets another mechanic gig, and Derek gets a job as a gravedigger, working nights. It’s boring, but blissfully solitary, and if Laura is sad that he’s given up on community college, she doesn’t mention it.

They take better precautions, going by fake names and keeping the Camaro stored blocks away from the apartment and not using it on daily basis. Because of their schedules, it works out that one of them is usually awake while the other sleeps, and even if the one awake isn’t home, it still means that no one’s going to catch both of them asleep again.

One night when he arrives home at 5am, Laura is up and waiting for him. 

“I’ve been seeing someone,” she says.

Derek raises an eyebrow. “I know.” He’s noticed the same scent on her a few times over the past two weeks. A man, probably in his thirties, who smells like suits and ties, staplers and fax machines, and the nice restaurants that he’s probably taken Laura to. Derek would bet anything that they met when the man brought his car into Laura’s shop, and he would also bet that Laura first gave him the time of day because she was interested in whatever fancy car the man owns.

“I’m going to start bringing him by here.” Laura watches Derek closely for his reaction, and he doesn’t bother trying to hide his displeasure at the prospect. Laura never brought anyone to their place in Philly, knowing that the scent of a stranger in their home would put him on edge. 

“I’d really prefer it if you didn’t,” Derek says.

“Too bad.” Laura stands up off the couch, crosses her arms and flips her hair over her shoulder, and Derek feels annoyance flare up.

“Can’t you fuck at his place? Or in a hotel?” he says unwisely.

Laura’s jaw drops in surprise. “Asshole!” she says, and Derek almost thinks that she’s going to let it go or stick with yelling at him, but then she’s behind and twisting his arm up painfully behind his back. Derek has to bite his lip to keep from yelping. 

“I’m gonna bring him over,” she says. Derek growls and she nips at his neck, just barely breaking the skin. She twists his arm a little higher and then lets go, stepping back. 

Derek turns to face her, rubbing his shoulder and glaring. “Why do you need to?”

Laura shrugs. “Maybe I’ll want to make him my mate someday,” she says. “It could happen! I don’t plan on being alone my whole life, and he’s powerful and practical. He’d make a good wolf,” she insists when Derek scoffs.

“Jesus, just stop, I feel a little sick.” Derek knows how childish he sounds, but he’s unable to make himself stop.

“Would you like to meet him?” 

“No,” Derek says immediately, and just glares more when Laura looks aggravated with him. She could just command Derek to meet him, but she probably realizes that wouldn’t end well.

“I’m going to bed,” Derek says, turning to leave, but Laura catches his elbow.

“It’s something you could stand to think about, you know. A mate.”

Derek tries to take his arm back but she holds on, trying to force him to turn around and look at her again. He twists his neck so that his face is still turned away. “No thanks.”

“I’m serious, Derek, it’s been years and you haven’t--“

Derek finally manages to yank his arm away and stumbles forward, gets his back to the wall. His hackles up, he’s snarling and ready to yell at her but there’s no aggression in Laura’s face, just naked concern and sadness. It takes some of the wind out of his sails. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“I worry about you. I worry that you’re not going to let yourself have-- _anything,_ ever, not a mate, not a companionship, not even sex.”

Derek laughs. “You’re worried because I’m not getting laid?”

“Yes,” Laura says firmly, like she’s refusing to let herself be embarrassed by this conversation. “I don’t think it’s healthy.”

Derek covers his face with his hands. “This is not something I want to talk about with you.”

“You need to let off some steam! You’ve needed to for so long, and it’s not like you’d have a hard time finding someone who wanted to get into your pants—I mean, you know that, right? This isn’t some self-esteem thing?”

Derek lets his hands drop so that he can wish death upon his sister with his eyes. She’s _teasing_ him. “Stop talking.”

Laura’s face softens, and she comes over to take his hands, running her thumbs over his knuckles. “It’s just... it’s like the more time passes, the more you cut yourself off from the world, not less.”

“How lucky for the world,” Derek says, and Laura makes a soft, injured noise.

“It’s sex, Derek. Just sex. And it can be casual and make you feel good, and—and do you really want it to be something that Kate took for you? Forever?” 

Derek hasn’t heard Laura say Kate’s name in three years. He looks up to meet her eyes and takes his hands back. “No, but that’s the way it is.”

Laura’s brow furrows, but she lets him step away. “You’re letting it be the way it is.”

Derek lifts a shoulder in a shrug. “Yeah.” He goes to his room and shuts the door behind him, half-expecting Laura to come after him because she can’t just let it fucking drop. But he can hear the footsteps as Laura returns to her own room. 

He remembers with a sudden pang the one-bedroom they’d shared in Philly, which he never thought he’d miss. It had been Laura’s idea to get separate rooms when they got to Vegas, and Derek prefers having this space to himself, but—he has been feeling his solitude lately, more than he did before. 

He wonders if Laura made the decision to rent a two-bedroom because she was thinking of Derek and what he might need (or herself and what she might need), and thought they should have privacy. He feels like he’s disappointing her somehow, because he can’t loosen up, can’t let go, can’t stop the dreams about Kate. They’re different by now, less frequent and less familiar, the weight of years having slightly blunted his memory of her scent and her mannerisms. But he remembers with perfect clarity her face and what her hands felt like. 

 

*

 

He’s unhappy the first time he comes home in the morning to smell Laura’s boyfriend (turns out his name is Ian) in the apartment, but it bothers him less than he expected—the scent doesn’t prevent him from falling asleep, hasn’t lingered when he wakes up the next afternoon, and there are no other physical indications in his space that a stranger was ever here. Laura even left a pizza for him on the counter as a thank you. It’s meat-lovers, and still warm when he rolls out of bed—she must have called in the delivery while she was at work. He loves pizza for breakfast.

Laura thinks that his discomfort with seeing her in a romantic relationship stems from it reminding him of the lack of love, sex, or anything in his life. It’s not that, not jealousy. It’s just that he has a family already. He doesn’t want it to change.

He understands Laura wanting to move forward, admires it even. He’s happy to have her moving forward as much as she wants to, as long as she doesn’t try to force him to come with her.

But of course she wears him down on the question of Ian, and Derek finds himself ordered to stay home for dinner one evening. Laura makes lasagna. Apparently Ian is bringing over homemade cookies for dessert. Apparently Ian bakes.

“She’s told me so much about you!” Ian says when he shakes Derek’s hand, and Derek wants to laugh at just how much Laura will never be able to tell this man. 

Ian is 29, younger than Derek originally guessed, and he works for an advertising firm. He’s slightly attractive but very charming, and doesn’t seem to get bothered or nervous when Derek keeps his participation in dinner conversation to an absolute minimum. (Laura hopefully warned him that her brother wasn’t talkative.) He smells like Old Spice and ballpoint pens and car freshener, and he’s not lying when he tells Laura that he’d love to take her to the touring Richard Serra exhibit because he really thinks she would enjoy it.

Another month goes by before Derek sees Ian again. Laura invites him in because she’s late getting ready for their date, and he and Derek watch TV together for five minutes in almost complete silence.

It takes Derek a while to realize it when he stops smelling Ian on Laura or in their apartment. 

“You broke up with him,” he says when he figures it out. “You broke up with him and didn’t tell me about it.”

They’re in the mountains outside the city, two humans walking back to their car after hours of chasing each other, getting out excess anxiety and stress and wearing themselves out in their other form. There’s a half moon tonight, only partly blocked by clouds, and they’re far enough away from the city that Vegas’s light pollution doesn’t hide the stars anymore.

“No, Derek, I didn’t,” Laura says flatly.

“Why not? You know it wouldn’t have surprised me.”

He gets shoved into a tree for that, the bark scraping up his shoulder. “I did actually like him, you know. Kind of. Just not enough.”

Derek wants to point out that this was obvious to him from the start, but he doesn’t want Laura to start breaking bones. She starts walking again, faster this time, and he hurries to catch up. 

“I’m just trying to think about the future,” she says when Derek is beside her again.

Derek looks up to where the treeline meets the sky. When he thinks about the future, all he can see are fingers pointing backward. He figures that Laura must know that. 

The present moment, if he tries to separate it from everything else and take it on its own merits, is less terrible—sagebrush around them, open space and moonlight, his sister but no one else around to bother him. Too bad he can’t hold onto it. 

 

*

 

Laura offers to take him to a casino for his 21st, but Derek declines. He can’t think of a worse way to spend any night, let alone his birthday. They go backpacking instead—well, they don’t bring backpacks or tents, but the basic concept is the same. 

Spending a three-day weekend completely out of his human form feels so good that if it weren’t for Laura, Derek would never want to come back. When you’ve shifted, you _can_ hang on to your human mind if you have practice and willpower, but you don’t have to. You can close your eyes and let your conscious mind slip under and go quiet, which will probably lead to someone getting hurt or killed if you’re around humans, but in the wilderness, with your alpha there to check you—it’s like the deepest sleep with no nightmares.

The wolf does feel things—hunger, fear, physical pain, a certain kind of excitement. But the wolf can’t regret or worry or hope for anything. Getting to spend three days in this state is a very good birthday present.

Laura, human again, kneels beside him and shakes him awake when the sun comes up Tuesday morning. The sound of her voice brings him reluctantly back to himself, and he doesn’t want this, she knows he doesn’t want this. Derek doesn’t try to verbalize the crushing sensation of being forced to face the world again. He just presses his face against Laura’s thigh, and she murmurs to him, her palm a solid weight on the back of his neck. 

 

*

 

The days pass without anything to distinguish one from another. Their time in Vegas is hot and dry, with some months being hotter and drier than others. They stop spending as much time in the mountains; the last time they go, they spend too much time as wolves, and Derek is the one who has to shift back to human and try to convince Laura to come back to herself, which is a painful process that involves getting a lot of gashes that seem to take forever to heal. Laura doesn’t want to go back after that. She says it’s dangerous for her to indulge too much in something that lets her check out so dramatically. Derek can’t help but feel some alarm at the fact that she even _wants_ to check out so badly. Maybe it’s selfish, but he feels like that’s supposed to be his job.

But the incident in the mountains fades into the background as time takes them further away from it. Sometimes Derek manages to go a whole day or two without thinking of Kate, and then he’ll be driving home from the grocery store or the gym, and something—a woman crossing the street, a sign in a shop window, or just the angle of the sun at a certain time of day—will bring some memory rushing to the surface. It’s not something he’s ever able to avoid for any meaningful length of time, and it gets worse when he’s at work, with the inevitable downtime that comes in the middle of the night. At those times he tries as hard as he can to bring up memories of his parents, his older brother, his cousins, because as awful as it is he’s terrified of how blurry their features are in his mind when Kate’s smile is still so sharp, so easily recalled. 

Laura starts sleeping longer hours, and stops bringing up the future. 

She surprises Derek one morning with the announcement that she has to go back to Beacon Hills. She sounds surprisingly fine about it, and just shrugs when Derek looks at her like she’s crazy.

“It’s only for a few days. There’s just a slight hang-up with the insurance money, and I need to meet with the lawyers in person.”

Derek stares. “A ‘slight hang-up’ six years after the fact?” 

“I know, it’s crazy. Fucking lawyers and insurance people, you think that you’ll never have to deal with them again and that’s when they get you.” Laura laughs, shaking her head. In retrospect, it will be so god damn obvious to Derek that she’s so bizarrely sanguine at the prospect of returning to the town where their whole family died because she’s trying to protect Derek, trying to throw him off the scent by hiding her own alarm at the messages she’s received about the spirals. He’ll hate himself for falling for it so easily, for letting her casualness convince him that it’s all right to let her go by herself. 

She decides against taking the Camaro, saying that she’d rather take a short flight and just rent a car for the time that she’ll be there. Derek drives her to the airport early in the morning, and all she has is her purse and a small carry-on duffel.

“Well, I’ll see you at the end of the week. Don’t have too much fun without me.” The corner of her mouth lifts up in a half-smile, and she looks more chipper than she has in months.

“I’ll try really hard not to,” Derek says. He thinks about asking her, one more time, why she’s doing this and how she can possibly be so okay with going back. But it’s not like he’ll get a different answer. He limits himself to, “Be careful, okay?”

“Of course. You, too.” She reaches across the seat and they hug quickly, her claws raking affectionately through his hair before she pulls back and gets out of the car. Derek watches her walk through the sliding doors inside before driving away.

She calls him every night, but they don’t have much to talk about. She doesn’t give many details about the meetings with the lawyers, saying that it bores her to tears and she doesn’t want to talk about what she’s spent the whole day talking about. She asks him if it’s all right for her to talk about being back, about the town and what it’s like walking around and what’s changed. Derek closes his eyes and considers for a couple of seconds before saying no, which she doesn’t seem disappointed by.

They’re short conversations, which just frustrate him more than anything else, because it’s much harder to tell what Laura’s thinking or feeling over the phone, when he can’t smell her or hear her voice very well. Hearing the pale imitation of her voice just heightens his sense of being alone. 

He tells her that he has a bad feeling about all this, and she assures him that it’s just the sensation of being physically apart from his alpha for three days. She feels it too, and she’s anxious to get home as soon as possible so they can be together again. 

 

*

 

She’s in the woods, mere yards away from the shell of their old house, and it’s ludicrous to think that she can smell charred flesh—no one is burning, there are no fires anywhere near—but it’s there all the same and now she’s sweating because she doesn’t trust her senses. She thinks she’s alone out here, but she can’t say for sure, and that’s an awful feeling. The growing awareness that she’s in danger has been with her since before she came back to Beacon Hills, but it’s spiked exponentially since this morning. She should leave, because even if she’s just being paranoid, Derek is waiting for her and—

The dream shifts, and he’s himself again, playing with his cousin Alice in the backyard. Alice has her Barbies out, making them run on all fours like werewolves, and Peter is going to grumble at him later for letting his daughter ruin one of her nicer dresses while playing in the dirt.

“It’s so hot out here,” Alice complains, and Derek gets goosebumps, and then Kate steps out into the field of his vision. Derek roars and lunges for her, but it’s too late, the flames are already higher than his head. Alice is no longer there, he doesn’t know where she went, and Derek turns and runs but Kate’s already caught him by the wrist. Everything is unbearably hot and then the fire is gone and he’s falling—no, they’re falling together, tumbling naked into Kate’s bed. She takes his hand and puts it in between her legs, and he tries to recoil but his limbs won’t work.

Then he’s Laura again, as she stumbles and clutches at a tree for support. She should never have come, she let her curiosity and yearning for family blind her. Now she’s wounded, she doesn’t know how badly, she can’t afford to take any time to pause and check, she has to keep running and—

Derek jerks awake and bolts up to a sitting position in his bed, his blood pounding in his ears. It takes several seconds before he remembers where he is. The details of his dream are already dissolving away from him, but his heart is still caught up in his throat and the leftover terror is all the information that he needs. Laura’s in danger.

He starts throwing clothes into a duffel without really seeing anything he touches. Laura must have lied to him about the reason for her trip to Beacon Hills: the ridiculousness of their lawyers needing to negotiate anything six years after the fact, the way she’s evaded giving him any details in their phone conversations—the instinct to obey his alpha combined with a reluctance to think too hard about anything involving Beacon Hills must have blinded him to the obvious. 

He calls Laura, and as he expected it goes straight to voicemail. He leaves a message telling her to call him right back, knowing that it’s pointless. He locks the front door behind him and gets into the Camaro less than five minutes after he woke up, the sweat from his nightmare still drying on his skin.

This far from the strip, Vegas is like any other city, which means it’s relatively quiet at 5am on a weekday. Derek’s is one of the only cars on the road, and no one catches him running the four red lights he has to go through before he gets on the highway. He has to struggle to suppress the wolf with every passing second, because he doesn’t have his fear and panic under control at all and that triggers the shift more automatically than almost anything else. 

Wolfing out completely will make it difficult to drive at the speed he needs to without crashing. He needs a fully human mind to go 120 miles per hour. It’s the only thing that helps him tamp it down, but the points of his teeth still push against his tongue and he knows his eyes are fully blue. 

He’s been going west for half an hour before he remembers that he needs to have a better idea of where he’s actually going. Laura got him a smartphone six months ago, and this is the first time it’s been at all useful to him, putting him on the right path towards her and reassuring him that the miles and miles of desert on either side of I15 will end eventually.

Miles. Hours. Derek tries to focus on the road. He would take a scalpel and excise his imagination from his brain right now if he could.

After six a.m., the number of other cars on the highway starts to increase. More cops, too. He has to slow down to accommodate. At around 6:30 he starts pouring sweat, but he feels cold all over—he’s never had a fever, but this is how humans describe the sensation of “feverish.”

At 7:15 a connection snaps bloodily inside him and instantly creates a yawning black hole in his chest. Derek brakes and pulls over onto the highway’s shoulder, not even seeing the accident he almost causes. He felt this six years ago when his father died, but the severance was drowned in the rest of his grief and anyway, that connection transferred to Laura immediately. This time, there’s no one to step in to the other end of the chain, and nothing to mask the immediate rubber-band-snap of his alpha’s death. 

Laura’s gone. He would deny it if he could, but the loss is physical: there’s not enough air going to his lungs no matter how much air he gulps down. His ears buzz and dark spots form in his vision. 

The sky’s getting lighter, and there’s so much flat land around him that if he looks over his shoulder, he can see the line of light creeping closer, chasing the shadows on the ground as the sun rises. Soon the fact of daylight will be unquestionable. Cars zoom by at unsafe speeds on either side of him, and inside every one there’s a human who isn’t experiencing their sister’s death right now. Derek’s hands are still on the steering wheel, the engine still running. He is frozen. 

Once when he was eleven and Laura was thirteen, Laura had a nasty fall while they were biking together in a suburb close to the woods. It broke her ankle, and she’d cried loudly, but luckily no adults came around to investigate, even though it had been the middle of the afternoon. Derek kept an arm around her and let her lean on him and she held on the whole way home, limping even though the ankle healed quickly. When their mother asked Laura if anyone saw them, Laura replied that she didn’t know, and their mother got agitated.

“That’s the sort of thing you have to pay attention to! If people realize that you’re _walking away_ from an accident that clearly broke an ankle, they’ll start asking questions. You have to be more careful.”

“God, Mom, I’m sorry that I was too distracted by a broken bone to notice!” Laura’s eyes filled up again, and she turned her anger on Derek, typical of the way they’d been lashing out at each other lately. “Derek was right there and he didn’t have a broken anything, so why aren’t you yelling at him for slipping up?”

“Hey—“ Derek started to object, but their mother was already shaking her head.

“Because he’s not going to be your alpha someday. I know it doesn’t seem fair but your responsibility isn’t something you can be careless about. Even when you get hurt.” Laura didn’t talk back to that, closing her mouth in a thin and stubborn line. She wanted to be the alpha when they grew up, Derek knew that, but she’d spent that whole summer impatient with and resentful of the seriousness their parents were trying to impart. Everything seemed to annoy her: parents, summer camp, the full moon, the new moon, and Derek—especially Derek. Which was fine, because Derek was plenty annoyed with her right back, but it wasn’t like he had anyone else to play with. 

As their mother pulled her into a hug, Laura met Derek’s eyes over mom’s shoulder. Derek stuck his tongue out at her, and she glared back.

Now, on I15 in the Mojave Desert, Derek encourages the beginnings of his rage so that it can stopper the grief. Because he needs to keep driving and get to Beacon Hills today, while the trail is still fresh, and he can’t do that if he crumples. 

The sun is coming up in his rearview mirror as he turns the key in the ignition and presses down the gas.


End file.
